How to Account for Time Worked on Vacation Days & Weekends (Avoid Diluting Average Metrics)

The Insights dashboards in ActivTrak Premium display daily average metrics (productive hours per day, focus hours per day, etc.) for individual users and teams. If a user is active on their computer for a short period of time during a non-work day (for example, if they spend 10 minutes checking email on a Saturday), the average metrics for the user and their team can be impacted, and as a result, may appear artificially low.

This is due to the way average metrics are calculated — a user’s total number of productive hours is divided by the number of days that any activity took place (active days) on the user’s computer during a given time period. Consider the following example:

An employee works Monday through Thursday, logging 32 hours of productive time for an average of 8 productive hours per day (32 hours / 4 active days). The employee takes a vacation day on Friday but spends 15 minutes on their computer checking email. Their total productive time (32 hours and 15 minutes) will now be divided by 5 days, reducing their average productive hours per day to 6.5.

We understand that with flexible work situations, an example like the one above may be common, and that’s why we have enabled the Configuration to Compute Averages setting, which determines the minimum time threshold for an “active day,” based on hours of productive time. By adjusting this value, you can gain a more accurate picture of employees’ work habits.

The default value for this setting is two hours for customers who started their ActivTrak Premium Plan on or after September 16, 2021. For customers who started an ActivTrak Premium Plan before September 16, 2021, the default value is zero hours. Two hours was chosen as the default to account for casual device usage such as checking email or responding to messages during non-work days. If the threshold is set to two hours, for example, a user must log at least two hours of productive time in a given day in order for that day to be counted as an “active day” and factored into the calculation of averages.

Revisiting the example above, if the minimum time threshold was set to two hours, the employee’s 32 hours and 15 minutes of productive time would be divided across 4 days, not 5, and would reflect 8.1 productive hours per day as opposed to the lower 6.5 productive hours per day.

To access the Configuration to Computer Averages setting, navigate to Insights > Configuration from the left app navigation.

Scroll down the page until you see the section called Configuration to Compute Averages. Here, you can configure the minimum number of productive hours per day per user to consider a day active and factor into your workforce analytics averages. After changing the number, click the green “Save” button, as shown in the screenshot below. Changes will apply to your account after the next Insights data load and will be reflected retroactively in reports. See notes below for more information.

Note:

• All time worked on a device is counted towards a user’s total hours in a given time period. However, when calculating averages, a user's total hours in a given time period (including time worked on non-active days) are only divided by the number of active days in that time period. See the example in the table below:

Example of Average Productive Hours / Day Calculation:

• On days when a user does not meet the active day threshold, all activity will still be logged and will appear in ActivTrak reports.
• The ‘Configuration to Compute Averages’ setting applies to all users within an account, and cannot be configured differently for individual users or teams.
• The active day threshold you set will be applied retroactively in Insights Dashboards to enable an accurate comparison of data across time periods. You may see higher values for average metrics after configuring a minimum threshold.

Learn More:

• Insights Configuration
• Insights Data Glossary